Babylon Rising
by unknown user
Summary: A new beginning, eh? As you wish. You may find your surrogate life... stranger. I only hope you ride the crossing when the tower to heaven is rebuilt... Eh, Shinji? Possible S/R
1. 01: Neon Genesis Revisited

**BABYLON RISING**  
Chapter 01: Neon Genesis Revisited

The land was dry, _arid_. There was no water, and even the moisture of dream-hands and dream-feet seemed to be sucked out by the beating sun, disolving his nature. _Primeval sea, without water you are arid. Mummu, mother of all, you are arid, and you may give no life._ In a sudden interstellar burst of wet, living data, the desert before him became a tropical oasis, no more a mirage than the dry, colourless world it replaced. _Ki, she who is the mother of order and chaos; An has filled her, and the sky and earth are made one, separated by the blade of Ash._ Paradise? Eden? No, Dilmun. Why?

"_**Negeltu.**_" ("_Awaken_")

Shinji awoke with a start, the details of his familiar world resettling around him. Soon, he had forgotten about the strange dream, though something nagged at him. Something about the cieling.

"Wow, you're up early." He glanced over, his new caretaker stifiling a yawn as she slinked into the newly-cleaned kitchen, stretching in an ambiguously sensual manner. 'New' is a contraversial term in such situations -- Shinji had only been living with Misato for a week (not even, he thought), yet he already had formed a routine to rival even vague memories of any time before his move. She, on the other hand, was not yet quite accustomed to his presence, nor his love of order.

"I'm usually like this. I woke up earlier today because of an odd dream." He continued to tend to the breakfast.

Misato swallowed a giggle. "An odd dream, you say? Was _I_ in this dream, hmm?" She purred.

Shinji blushed slightly, then answered in as pedantic a tone as he could. "No. I can't remember the dream very well, but it was very odd, and anything about it that could be... sexual... wasn't explicit enough for you to make a feature." He saw her choke a bit on her beer when he used such direct and cant wording without bashfulness.

To Shinji's surprise, Misato took far longer to recover from the shock than expected. She sat wide-eyed for nearly a full minute, then looked to the side and bit her lip silently. _Does she have something she needs to tell me?_ He pushed the thought away, focusing on laying out the breakfast. Even Misato's cheer of "Ittadakimasu!" was restrained, and her beer chugging that followed had merely the pretense of normalcy.

Shinji finished breakfast quickly, nearly rushing out the door. Just as he was leaving, Misato called. "Shinji -- wait a moment." He paused.

"Here. It's a cell phone. In case we need to reach you, or you need to reach us."

"Thank you." He bowed, taking the cell, and waved behind him as he walked quickly off to school.

"It has begun."

The monolith opposite, Number 05, was the first to respond. "Yes. For the first time in 3'600 years, that being has Chosen."

"We could not hope for a better candidate. The Water Lord has been notoriously prickly to our plans, in some cases seeming to violate our **_ME GAL-LA-NI_**. I posit that this may be another snare by the Elohim Federation."

"We have no proof. Perhaps--"

The monolith labeled 00 emerged from the darkness, a deep, scratchy, popping-screeching sort of voice clanging with resonant_ authority_. "_Gentlemen. We can do nothing but posit. Deliberation is futile so early. **We wait**._" Before anyone could argue, the mysterious shape faded away again with an occult sense of finality that even elder adepts and grandmasters _dare_ not violate.

"Great gods, have mercy on our souls..."

_Again, with the Second Impact..._ Sitting in class, Shinji had little to do except daydream. He did not have a window seat as the young Ayanami did, and though he had a computer, typing anything on it that did not resemble notes would attract unduly attention. Today, however, daydreaming was more pleasant and constructive than usual; despite the droning monotone, the textbook-perfect word choice of the professor mixed with his own dazed state led to a pleasantly developing word tree in his mind, like magnetic poetry on the fridge door of his soul. Just as he was admiring his sophomoric faux-serious word choice in calling his soul a freezer...

**BZZ** He looked up suddenly. _My cell._ Looking around, he saw that no one had heard him. He checked, and found an SMS waiting for him. He saved it without reading it, waiting until lunch period.

A glance up to the window-staring beauty giving him a preciously unusual glare gave him second thoughts. She looked away, and he opened the message, from an unlisted recipient.

**HE WHO HAS TAKEN DOWN THE STARS, AND COMPUTED THEIR NUMBER. HE WHO WITH A WORD PILES THE FRUIT OF THE LAND PROSPEROUS TO THE SKY. OF THE LAND WAS SAID: NOT YET BREEDING GODS; BUT THE SEAL HAS BEEN BROKEN. A MAD GOD AWAKENS, AND YOUR VESSEL OVERFLOWS. WORD-RICH LORD OF THE WISE, IT IS YOU THE ANGELS SEEK.**

He was about to delete it, considering it spam poetry from some religious cult, but something about the oddness of the situation and something about the wording struck him, and he kept it in memory. He had been through lots of wierdness in the past few weeks -- very real, obviously true wierdness -- and had grown to realize that something that seems too strange to be true can still tear your head off, and it will still hurt. At this point, his mind had been torn open by the prodding of metal leads and the sharpness and pain of a familiarly alien conciousness -- anything he experienced would be worthy of inquiry, since anything he experienced would be mundane in comparison to the feeling of syncronization and that link to a mind so unlike his own, yet so compatible to his being.

He found a second message. It was far more simple:

**Meet me after school outside the entrance to the Prinbow box. - A. R.**

**A/N**:  
Just an idea that came to me randomly. If it's worth expanding upon, tell me.

P.S.: Much love to everyone at EGF who reluctantly beta'd and wished me luck. If you have any idea where this fic is going, tell me; you're either wrong, boring, convincing, or my new god. (Sorry gals -- there is no goddess but goddess. No pun intended on that "gal" quip. Oh hell, it's good enough that I can at least pretend I intended it.)


	2. 02: Those who low in the abzu lie

**Babylon Rising  
Chapter 02: Those who in the abzu stand low  
**

A sudden fresh summer rain began just as he left the school, heading to the nearby NERV headquarters. Shinji did not often like rain, but at the moment, he was unsure whether to panic in stress or feel calm and collected, and the cool pleasant sensation of the rain on his skin influenced his decision to the latter. He decided not to borrow a school umbrella.

Ideas bounced in his head, strange surreal ideas barely half-formed -- blood red seas lit orange by the hazy sunset, the wash of tides, fresh green lands and a winter he had never seen. Some of these images, he thought, could not have come from him, however in his (equally odd) state of euphoria, he didn't much care. Later, he thought jovially, Misato would likely say these were symptoms of shock. Perhaps they were. But even stranger was the fact that he -- a normally panicy and (he thought) cowardly boy -- was not at all afraid, nor seemingly scarred by his obviously scarring encounter of the previous day.

He reached the gate to the escallators deep into the geofront, noting poorly drawn graffiti of some large, lanky, scaly cat half-rubbed-off in blue sharpie on the base of the card reader. Putting his card through, the light went blue, and he entered, cool air conditioning blowing somehow without regard to the pressure entropy factor of an entirely unsealed turnstyle-type gate. Taking the second escallator towards the nerv pyramid, he noted that it was actually stepped, not smooth as he first thought. He noted as he went down that the lowest step had graffiti -- black spray paint had been the tool for emblazoning a large, calligraphically-ornate "1723". _Curiouser and curiouser_.

As he went downward, he noted the rush job that had been put on some pieces. The escallators had siezed up during some sections, and had to be treated like stairs, and at a certain level, the janitorial staff had seemingly abandoned it. There was smoke down here -- a soft blue-grey haze that hung thickly in the air over everything, but didn't smell like anything. He finally found a room labeled "Prinbow box", and upon opening it, found it in a state of what could only conservatively be complimented as complete ruinous disarray. The floor was covered in thick white ashy dust, the walls were cracked and had some kind of ivy he had never seen before growing out of them, the window was broken into a thousand pieces and looked out upon a broken landscape with a single eva clutching its head, tacked to the floor with red-orange glue, and the consoles were tipped and half-submerged in the floor. Sitting on the ledge of one like it was a mountain, an oddly perched Rei gazed to the side wall.

"What a mess."

She ignored him for a moment, before saying "The first apocalypse has come and gone, and the second has been engineered. The third will bring about the fifth world, and you have been chosen." She paused, and without looking to him, said "Do you understand?"

"Do I-- how could I?"

She turned to him, glancing him up and down with precise and coldly mechanical analysis, then turned back. "You have been chosen. You will understand."

He looked at the wall that Rei's gaze seemed to be directed at, and saw that she was looking at a logo, half hidden in the ivy. It was a circle with a line on its edge, tilted such that the line was at a 45 degree angle from both vertical and horizontal lines in the wall. It looked oddly familiar. "Gehirn. It was designed to bring about the second apocalypse, just as NERV was designed to engineer the fifth world. You have been chosen to wield the ME, as have I. The symbol there depicted only a dream. But with my birth, the distinction between dream and reality is blurred." She turned to him, and the hairs on the back of his neck raised as a chill made its way down his spine. She spoke in a suddenly inhuman voice. "**_DINGIR INNANA BASU - LA MUDU-A MUDU, LA DU-A DU, LA MALA-A MALA, ME GAL-LA-NI ME-INA BASU._**(I am the Holy Innana - I know the unknownable, create the uncreatable, that which is unlike anything I may create as the Grand ME is within me)", she said, and somehow he knew that her eyes were glowing a deep, impossible red.

In a voice that was not a voice -- a voice too old and kind and haunting to be human let alone his own -- he responded in kind: "**_DINGIR ENKI BASU - MUDUTU-A MUDU, DUTU-A DU, MALA-A MALU - E A SU ME GAL-LA-NI ME-ANA BASU._**(I am the Great Lord Enki - I know all that can be known, I create all that can be created, I know the likenesses of all things - A house of water I am, and the Grand ME of princeship flows from within me)". There was a silence, and though his body had been taken over by god-knows-what, to him it felt right.

Softly and meekly, she looked at him and said "This encounter has been pleasant, and has had the intended effect. The competing gods from beyond the firmament have returned, and we must resume the tower without destruction for the fifth world not to begin with its end. Your progenitor has been awakened, and he will aid you when necessary. Goodbye." She hopped off of the console with surprising grace, and walked towards the door.

"W-wait." She turned, eyes casting sharply into his own, and he backed off, letting her leave.

_The third apocalypse, eh? The third... impact?_

--

A/N:  
This chapter is short, yes, but it's also very much more inspired than the last one. As I was having trouble formulating it, I figured I might as well upload what I have, and take inspiration as it comes. If I had waited for the remainder to form, goddess knows how long it would be before the next update. I hope you enjoy this at least, as it has far more clues to the situation.


	3. 03: RIDE THE BLUEEYED DRAGON

**Babylon Rising  
Chapter 03: RIDE THE BLUE-EYED DRAGON**

Whenever one has found oneself in a bizarre alternate dimension, there are several rules of thumb for survival:

1) If there are fiction trope relating to the situation, go with whichever usually work.

2) If there is not, go with the flow.

3) Don't Panic; if it's a dream, panic will cause the dreamworld to turn nasty, and if it isn't, panic simply doesn't help much anyway.

Unfortunately, Shinji Ikari had been undergoing media withdrawl for so long that he could not recall such metafictional cliches. Bully for him. It is truly surprising how well he dealt with the immersion, seeing as how previously he had been getting his only media fix by playing Cruel Angel's Thesis in an infinite loop on his SDAT.

Rule number 5, seldom quoted but still important: in immersive thermoplastic environs, never mix and match incompatible sensory-ratioed media.

He didn't know rule number one, though. Nor that neither Japanese nor Sumerian had no word for precisely how hopelessly and inescapably screwed he was. Lojban might, though. They're anal pedants like that.

The dreams came to him again in the night, the fog of advanced-stage hypnogogia creeping through the cracks in the doorjam like electric voodoo, and he was enveloped in the blanketed womb of a simulacrum overmind.

"**_ABZU-A LU KI-NA-SU BASU ANU-INA-KE - ME GAL-LA-NI ANU-NA-KE KI-INA-KE ABZU-INA BASU - LU-LU LIBLUT-A IKKIBU SU A TAMMABU-A SISITU_**" ("_Those who in the abzu stand low to the earth are raised to the heavens to strike; the grand me from the heavens has fallen to the earth, and the abzu is overflowing with it. The men will be forbidden to live, when the dragon-beast he-who-is-of-water has been summoned_.")

A grey-black sky met a blood-red sea, golden moon tinged with scarlet.

Eyes met his, unseeing, from the darkness. He, the blind god Samahel who is not the Other nor the Self, curses the One for his ignorance.

An eye for an eye, and the world goes blind. But the world he made was blind to truth and lies by design. Blind to Unity.

Just as he had wished.

Checking his instruments, he-who-is-not-he returned to the heavens, proclaiming gold in the seas of the hearts of men, and angels below the firmament of their minds.

Awaken.

The air was dry, arid. His mouth felt filed with cotton. The sudden transition to summer blaze from the chill of nuclear night burst a bloom of sweat over his body. He sat up, but was held down.

"Hold on there, Shinji-kun. Ritsu here is still testing." He looked around, and collapsed back with an **oomph**

"What's going on?"

Glancing at a small device that looked suspiciously like a Tricorder, the bottle-blonde absently responded. "A sudden fever. We thought it might have to do with being blasted by the Fifth."

"The fifth? I haven't even fought the fourth yet..."

The two women glanced at one another, then Misato turned and spoke, concern shredding the stability of her voice, fringes of static dancing along the edges of the words like ocean waves. "You mean to say that you don't remember anything that happened in the last month?"

Before he could answer, the static soared, zooming and cracking, and he found himself floating in the mist, up to the now-familiar cieling. Wrapped in charred- black wings, a soft voice whispered in his ear. "There are Angels who protect great men, and I am such a one." Then, eyes shining and sharp teeth grinning a jagged smile, he burst into flame.

Shinji was in Unit 01 again, going against the third angel. It was as he remembered it, up until the point at which he tripped. As he fell, he braced himself, rolling into a backflip, his legs around the enemy's shoulder, screaming nonsense syllables incoherently as he tore the angel apart. He tore the still-glowing core from the disarmed and ravished body, and swallowed it whole, sprouting glowing blue wings and a third, cat-slit eye in his forehead. He felt no distinction between Self and Eva. The next moment, he was lying on a beach on the shores of Lake Asino, his head on the lap of a swimsuit-clad Rei, who was staring silently out to two pairs of legs sticking out of the reddening vortices of surf. A giant red 4-eyed head landed on the sand in front of them, but it felt natural not to move.

It grew legs and scuttled away back to the sea, running from white lizards with seagull wings and ragged bloodied fangs.

Let go. Don't move you. Wait for The Robot to be ready.

But The Robot is dreaming, while the world burns.

Let go. Don't panic.

Turn on. Tune in. Ping out.

**A/N**:  
Bleh.


	4. 04: DREAMS OF REASON

**Babylon Rising  
Chapter 04: DREAMS OF REASON**

Seeping, flowing, mind finding refuge in other flesh. Shinji found himself comfortably aware of his tounge, his fingers, his bare legs, and a pair of eyes and a set of muscles that while certainly his, were not as he remembered them. Looking up, he saw Rei's face, her breasts hanging free, and a sky painted pink and lavender. He was older, stronger.

"Know me, Shinji." She looked at him with a rare yet subtle hunger, continuing: "My blood is vengance."

He reached up to touch her face, to find his hand bandaged. He moved his gaze to look at it, and put it down, seeing himself looking at a distorted reflection in a dirty mirror. "Disgusting." His eye was hanging out of its socket.

"To dream the other dreams, the dreams of reason beyond man's grasp, is a gift." His mirror self distorted further. "All gifts are curses."

"Tell me." Shinji stared into blank silver mirror-eyes, pupils too small.

"A story that doesn't exist?" Dream-Shinji laughed, a jangle of rusty and tired bells. "You make your own narrative now. Now that you know the ending."

"And now that I have the words to say." Nodding, he slipped back into his bed just in time (or out of it) to wake and be nearly finished with breakfast when a tired Misato came stumbling out, on the day he was meant to fight the Fifth for the first time.

"Ahh, Shin-chan, what's for breakfast?" She didn't seem very interested in the solid breakfast food, managing to head directly for her morning beverage, fingering the can like an old lover after years of absence.

"Miso, toast, rice, and grilled salmon."

"Mm." She stared at her beer until he placed the plates in front of her and finally sat down himself, at which point the race to finish eating began. Shinji took the rate of the tortise, while Misato, in-between rushed bites, brought up the subject he had been waiting for. "Shin-chan, I forgot." She gulped. "Give this to Rei, will you? Ritsu forgot to hand it over." She grabbed at her bag, rummaging though it, and Shinji simply opened the small side pocket and removed the card, glancing at it.

"This?"

"Yep."

"I'll bring it before school. She has sync tests later today, so she'll miss school and return right before I can get over there, soaked with LCL."

"Okay." Misato was still distracted by eating the enormous breakfast as Shinji left, taking out the trash on his way.

Remembering that the doorbell would not work, he opened the door carefully, knocking on it hard with the toe of his shoe when it was open. "Ayanami! I have your replacement card! If you're in the shower, I can come back when you're dressed, since school isn't for a while now!"

A soft voice came from across the room. "I am not in the shower. You may come in."

Shinji entered to see Rei sitting up halfway in bed, evidently having just woken up. "I'm sorry, did I wake you?"

"Yes." There was no hint of deadpanning or of hurt. "I was instructed to warn you, of He Who Knows the Ways of Sin."

For a moment, Shinji saw her, illuminated through her one small window by the rising sun and the still-setting moon, an astronomical anomoly at this date. "Sin-Shamu" he repeated. "Requesting his words, no doubt."

"Perhaps." She got up and began to remove her night shirt, so shinji turned his back politely, pretending to examine her 500mL beaker of water when he was actually admiring her reflection in it. When she gave his reflection an icy glare, his eyes were caught instead by the label on a bottle of pills. "Useless. An attempt to subvert She of the Night. Lady Innin does not have a surfiet of respect for that which is possible, nor the boundaries that are designed to ensnare and make the impossible unreachable."

"That's my kind of girl," he said casually.

"The ME has been divided for a reason. I thank you for your prudence in that area."

He suddenly felt flushed and in-character. "You have sync testing today?"

"No."

"No?"

"You are remembering the incorrect base reality. Use the updated version. Reality forks are likely during any jump or modification."

"What happens in this one?"

"We walk to school together holding hands, and you confirm with inordinate embarassment when queried on our current relationship status."

"Ahh..." Shinji was beginning to both love and fear these new doors of perception.

**A/N:**  
Some SR meta-WAFF for postmodernist fanboys, and more oddness. Here's a game: see if you can count the direct references and enumerate them by citation.


End file.
